Sword & Trowel 2020: Issue 1
charges were brought against Marcus Dods (New Testament Professor in Edinburgh’s Free Church College) and A B Bruce (New Testament Pro- fessor in the Free Church College in Glasgow), the charges were utterly dismissed. The cause of Robertson Smith had triumphed. In 1899, George Adam Smith, Old Testament Professor in the Free Church College in Glasgow, famously declared, ‘mod- ern criticism has won its war against traditional theories. It only remains to fix the amount of the indemnity.’ The founding fathers of the Free
Church, men like Thomas Chalmers, William Cunningham, Robert Can- dlish, and Rabbi Duncan, had been believers in, and upholders of, the historic reformed view of the divine and verbal inspiration and infallibility of Scripture. They wrote on the sub- ject with clarity and vigour. A mere 32 years after their church was born, the Robertson Smith case flared up in 1875. That is how long, or how short, a time it took the Free Church of Scotland to slip its doctrinal moor- ings and begin its huge drift into liberalism.
Bible seen as a fallible record
In consequence, the Bible was no longer looked upon or treated as divine revelation, breathed out by the Spirit of God through supernaturally empowered prophets and apostles, true and trustworthy in all it taught, God’s Word to man. The Bible was now looked upon and treated as be- ing (at best) a fallible human record of how men had received revela- tion, and how that revelation had been shaped and adapted over the
page 28 STUDENT FOCUS MEETING
AT THE TABERNACLE A Student Focus meeting in Novem- ber entitled ‘How Brief is the History of Time?’ was attended by many young people of student age. Central to the the- ory of evolution is a belief in a timescale of millions – billions in fact – of years. But can the earth be that old? Stuart Burgess, professor of Engineering Design at the university of Bristol, examined the evidence and the issues.
centuries. Even when a particular book of the Bible claimed to be writ- ten by a certain prophet or apostle at a certain time in history, that was no guarantee; it could just be some sort of literary device to give credibility to the book, which might have been written much later by a totally dif- ferent man. Here was the Bible, not illuminating and regulating man’s reason, but being subjected to the control of man’s autonomous reason. What we think of as our scholarly reason decides what is and is not credible in the Bible. It should be said that most (if not all) of the liberalism in the Free Church was focused specifically on
From Divine Revelation to Human Reason
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36
